Posted by Tim on August 22, 2014
Restaurants that link an online ordering portal to their website are turning business away and paying to do so.
If you have an
online ordering link to a portal showing on your restaurant’s website, you are sending customers from your site, where they are completely focused on you, to a place where they can order from a variety of restaurants. You are essentially inviting them to order from one of your competitors.
Within the overall marketing strategy of your restaurant, the purpose of a portal is to bring you new customers, not the other way around. When you point customers to a portal to place an order at your restaurant, you pay extraordinary fees for that business. If you’re sending repeat customers to place orders through the portal, it’s even worse.
The average portal fee at Grubhub/Seamless is about 14% of each order. With your own,
individually-branded online ordering site, like NetWaiter, you would pay a small fraction of those fees.
Customers come to your website because they are interested in your restaurant. Don’t send them to a portal where you will either lose them to a competitor, or pay the portal’s huge fee. Keep them on your site, accept their order directly, retain all of the customer information, and save money while doing so.
